Currently, financial account providers, such as banks, credit card companies, merchants, lenders, and the like, analyze risk associated with a current or potential customer using such information as the customer's credit score, household income, assets, etc. These considerations may provide for an adequate assessment of the customer's present situation and ability to repay debt, but they provide limited insight as to the long-term ability of the customer to repay debt.
Creditworthiness is important to customers because it has an impact on their ability to open financial accounts, obtain or increase lines of credit, obtain certain interest rates, etc. A stable occupation is an asset to customers that could be treated as a positive indicator of creditworthiness; however, financial institutions do not currently use this information to determine creditworthiness.
In many credit applications, financial account providers request identification of the customer's current occupation. But beyond, perhaps, a rudimentary review that the customer is employed and that their reported annual income is consistent with their occupation, this information is largely unused by the financial account providers.
Thus, existing mechanisms fail to appreciate the asset a stable occupation represents to a consumer. Existing mechanisms are also limited in their ability to determine the long-term ability of a customer to repay debt. It is therefore desirable to provide a system and process that incorporates data on the stability of an occupation in determining the creditworthiness of a customer. Many benefits may be obtained by using occupational stability data in addition to traditional methods of determining credit worthiness. Such benefits may include, among others, savings from better prediction of credit risks and optimization of customer lines of credit. Using disclosed embodiments, financial account providers may also benefit from gains due to upmarket credit limit increases (e.g., increasing credit limits for upmarket customers) and graduation type programs (e.g., moving customers from main street type products to upmarket type products). The disclosed embodiments may be beneficial to many industries. For example, occupational stability data may be used to provide insurance providers a better understanding of a customer's ability to pay deductibles or premium installments for insurance products, which in turn would influence the premium calculations used by the insurance provider to determine the installment payment schedule.